


These are the sins of the fathers (their voices are still singing in our bones)

by olivemartini



Series: All The Lovely Ones Have Scars [13]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Howard's a bad parent guys, Hurt/Comfort, Insecure Tony, Pre-Iron Man, Pre-Relationship, Tony's got issues, pepper's trying to fix them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 09:39:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14691495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olivemartini/pseuds/olivemartini
Summary: "He was a good man,"  Tony says, looking in the mirror like he was trying to pick apart the shadows of his parents he saw in his own features, twisting his hands around the edge of the counter in a white knuckle grip.  "Just not a good father."





	These are the sins of the fathers (their voices are still singing in our bones)

Pepper's learned how to watch him.

He's an expressive person, for all he tries to hide.  Like, when his smile is soft and his laugh is quiet, just a little huff of air that fills the space between the two of them, it means he's tired, but in the way that means he's just had a busy day and he's actually intending to sleep.  Or that when he picks his flashiest watch ( _the one that had holograms built into it before anything else had holograms_ ) for an interview, it means that he's nervous.  And that sometimes, even when he looks happy, he's not happy at all.

There's cracks beneath the surface.  Pepper's learned to pick them out- the way his smile stretches too tight and his words get knocked loose in the air right after he says them, like even he believes that he is not saying anything real, nothing concrete.  There's a wrinkle right by the eyes, somehow, where the skin bunches and she can see the panic building if he lets her catch a glimpse of him head on.  And he gets caught up in the wave of his own momentum, like sitting still would be too much of a thing for anyone to ask of him, so his hands wave at invisible spectators and his smile is so wide you can see the full whites of his teeth by light of the camera flashes and he stands just a bit too close for a bit too long.  

It's like that today.

She's watching from the sidelines, back where the cameras won't see her and the fans won't think to look.  Pepper's long stopped being left behind in the car to wait- she's now seen as an integral part to the Tony Stark show, like they're a package deal.  Like its a fact of the universe that where he goes, Pepper will follow, as unquestioned by his colleagues and admirers as the idea that gravity will always be in place to hold him down to earth.

Mostly, it's a blessing.  There's no hoops to jump through, no assistants to battle against, no red tape to have to untangle.  The Tony Stark umbrella of influence saves her from other things, too, like waiting in lines when she goes for her morning coffee ( _which Tony has insisted on paying for as part of her Christmas bonus)_ and not having to worry about corporate clowns thinking that they can look up her skirt just because she's wearing one.  But today, it still means that even though she is important and has power and can fix a lot of things, she cannot protect him from this, whatever this is.

It might be in his head.  She's noticed that, too, how there is something that he has to battle that the rest of the world does not, like not only can he see the way to connect the dots where other inventors before him couldn't, he can also see the ghosts snapping on his heels, invisible to everyone else, that he must constantly try to outrun. 

Or it might not.  Probably not, actually, because in this case, it might be the fact that he has had to sit through a one hour interview about the great Howard Stark and his life, his legacy and how it feels to have the weight of that settled onto his shoulders at such a young age, how he weathered through the storm that was his parents death and how he is planning to expand the empire his father created, if he will ever be able to step out of Howard's shadow.

He handles it all with grace.  It's why he is still the face of the company and Pepper is not, despite all of Stane's threats to change that.   _You bastards,_ she thinks, tightening her hold on the clipboard in her hands as she watches Tony take a drink of his water in order to by himself time.   _What gives you the right?_

(She asks people that question a lot.  Like, what gives people the right to recount the people who he may or may not have slept with, or plaster the gossip rags with pictures of him passed out at a party, or that one time they snapped a photo of him crouched down over his mother's grave.)

Tony doesn't flinch.  He doesn't even pause.  He has learned how to push through these moments long before Pepper knew how much he hated them, long before she knew how deeply she would want to protect him from things like this.

"Is that really all the time we have?"  Tony stands when the interviewer does.  He's got his camera smile on, the one you wouldn't be able to tell is fake unless you really knew him, because even though he does not owe them anything, even if the public is, for the most part, a vicious mass of biting teeth, he still does not want to be rude.  Pepper hadn't expected it, but Tony is a man that bleeds kindness.  "Time flies when you're having fun, I guess."

 "I guess."  They shake hands, and Pepper catches the imperceptible moment of hesitation that the rest of the world will miss, sees the tightening in his shoulders and the tensing of his muscles.  But he does.  She's glad- they had practiced for over an hour in his workshop the day before, hand shake after hand shake after hand shake.  "Ladies and Gentleman, Tony Stark!"

It was a tv special that people would watch to take their minds off the kids that that they were draining themselves dry for and the day jobs that they hated, where they reminisce about a man that they had claimed to love because of the things he created but ultimately forgot.  News stations would run clips and blogs would critique and Tony's fanpages would go crazy at the pain they thought they saw on his face, but in the end, it would fade away, replaced by the bigger and brighter and better, just like everything else does.

She just wishes that would help Tony.

Pepper follows him back to the dressing room without being invited, because he had brushed past her without a word, ripping off his microphone and shoving it into the hands of an anxiously awaiting intern.  It means that he is in a bad place, a panicked place, and she does not want him to have to drag himself out of it alone.

She catches the door right before it swings closed, and by the time Tony realizes she has followed him in, he has already ripped open the buttons of his shirt, and the sight brings her up short for a moment.  He has the grace to look sheepish, but doesn't bother to redo it.

"Are you alright?"  Pepper perches up on the arm of one of the couches.  "You looked....."   _Sad?  Upset?  Uncomfortable?_

 _like this isn't what you were meant to be doing,_ she settles for instead.   _Like they should be making anyone else but you do this, because this was not the life you were meant for._

Tony doesn't answer, just stares at himself in the mirror, his hands twisted around the edge of the dresser in a white knuckle grip.  Pepper has to hold herself back from going to him, which is getting harder as the days go by- she's watching herself do it in her mind, how she would walk up behind him and wrap her arms around him, tuck her head against his shoulder blades, slide her hands underneath his open shirt and place her palms flat against her bare skin.  She was having more of those kind of ideas lately, as much as she was trying to push them away.

"I'm fine."  He's still looking at himself in the mirror.  Maybe, Pepper thinks, maybe he's looking at the shadows of his parents that were left behind in his face.  He looked a lot like the old pictures of Howard, but maybe there was some part of himself that he could find Maria in, too.  She hopes so.  "Why wouldn't I be fine?"

"I just think it'd be hard."   Pepper doesn't know what to do, sometimes.  She's learning, but trying to help Tony is still like walking through a minefield.  One wrong step and everything could go to pieces.  "Having to talk about them all night."

He turns away from the mirror and ducks into the bathroom. She can hear the water running and knows that he is running cold water over his wrists, one of his tricks to force his mind into calming down.  When he emerges, he doesn't look fine, exactly, but he doesn't look at her with that frantic urgency that he had been.  

There is no desperation in his eyes anymore.  Pepper's learned to take it as a win.

"He was a good man, wasn't he?"  The question catches her off guard and Tony must be able to tell, because he adds, "Howard.  My father."

"I suppose."  She slipped down off the arm of the chair and onto the cushion.  "I didn't really know him."

He lets his breath out in one long rush of air, like he had needed her permission to breathe again.  Needed something to knock the air back into the lungs.  It seems like her words did the trick.

"That's the thing.  Everyone thinks they knew him, just like they think they know me."   _I know you,_ she wants to say, but doesn't.  It could not possibly be a helpful comment.  "I suppose he was a good man."

He stares at the mirror again, and Pepper wants so badly to ask what he thought he was seeing.

"Shame he wasn't as good of a father."  

Pepper had known that there were issues that Tony didn't like to talk about, but she had never thought it was something that he would bring up with her, never thought that he was aware of it enough to confront.  Didn't think he trusted her enough to drag it back into the light when he had clearly been working so hard to keep it buried.

"He never liked me."  Tony was looking at his hands, those wonderful hands that had made so many things, suffered so many cuts and burns and scrapes and scars in the name of pushing forward, of breaking boundaries.  He's created miracles with those hands, and he's created horrors.  Pepper's not sure he'd be able to count all the things he's made if he was asked.  "I kept trying- what kid doesn't think that their parents will love them?- but he never, he never seemed to take hold of the idea that he was a dad.  Like I was another bothersome problem that he could throw money at and fix."  He laughed, but it wasn't funny.  "Not that it worked."

"I'm sure he loved you,"  Pepper said, throat dry, stomach aching at the thought of a tiny Tony just looking for someone to tell him that he wasn't doing anything wrong, that he was fine, that he was being good.  That he was loved, but she couldn't promise him that, because she did not know him and did not know his father and if there is one thing she has learned, it's that this world is not fair.  She would like to be able to say that it is a universal truth that parents are incapable of showing their children anything other than love, but she has seen too much evidence to the contrary to make it sound believable.  "He had to love you."

"That's what my mom always told me.  I wouldn't know.  He never said it."  Pepper hates it, suddenly, this life, these people with their questions and the demands and the money they throw around because they never had to learn the true value of a dollar and what it means to work for it, not like Tony has learned how to work for it, hates this stupid dressing room and the studio lights and the limosuine waiting outside, wants to take him away and hide him somewhere the world would not think to look.  "And then he died."

"He had to."  She reached out to him, never mind if she had the right to do it or if it was improper, but he was too far away and the gesture went unnoticed.  "Anyone who knew you like that had to love you."

They are veering towards dangerous territory.  To things they only come close to admitting when he's drunk territory.  To the thing only Rhodey and her sister seem to know territory.  

"I want to believe it."  He is looking at her like she might hold the answers.  "I'm still trying to believe it."

"You don't have to."  She would never be able to fix this for him, no matter what else happens between them.  There would be nothing to soothe this ache.  "I'll do enough believing for both of us."

"Thanks, Pep."  He smiles, and then starts to button his shirt back up, slide the jacket on, fix his smile back into place.  "Here's hoping you might just be right."

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on Instagram @olive.writes.fanfic


End file.
